Award-winning blogazine, primarily about painting
Monday, May 13, 2024
On Artfcity, Whitney Kimball observed, with some justification, that young artists these days seem broadly reluctant to incorporate confrontational political content into their work. But there are many salutary role models, from William Powhida and Jen Dalton to Marlene Dumas and Steve Mumford. Wedding heart and craft, Margaret Murphy should […]
Remember Worcester-born, Berlin-based Ryan McLauglin’s Treif Collage paintings at Frieze last year? Hovering between still life and abstraction, the charming yet dour small-scale paintings featured a minimal, greyed-down palette and shallow space. In “Raisins,” his solo show at Laurel Gitlen, McLaughlin has moved even closer to abstraction, depicting the flattened […]
Gregory Amenoff has discovered a new decisiveness. He generated his previous paintings improvisationally, arriving at images directly through the process of painting. In contrast, Amenoff’s new large-scale canvases are based on small pencil studies, which he made during a trip to Paris in the summer of 2012. “I was staying […]
Iridescence is the unphotographable thread that runs through LeighTarentino‘s winter landscapes and Duane Slick‘s stripes and Coyotes on view at the Chazan Gallery in Providence. Tarentino’s shimmering night paintings depict houses, yards and gardens illuminated by artificial lights hung on solitary ornamental trees. Carefully drawn, the masked geometric shapes create […]
Detroit artist Scott Reeder’s compelling show at Lisa Cooley is full of wise-ass text-based work that features masking, airbrush and more. In the back room, two large canvases are painted to look like old-fashioned blackboards. The one on the left, Alternative Titles for Exhibitions I’ve Seen, has been selected as […]
My neighbor and fellow abstract painter Matthew Langley and I have always agreed that process is important–that how an abstract painter paints is as revealing as what he or she paints. At art school in the eighties and early nineties, during a period of intensely tactile materiality for abstract painting, […]
Kianga Ellis Projects is hosting �Water, Water� 8 Strange Days in the City That Never Sleeps,� an exhibition organized by artist Edie Nadelhaft that considers how Hurricane Sandy, the superstorm that devastated the East Coast last fall, affected artists both in terms of their studio situations and their work. I […]
Guest Contributor Jonathan Stevenson / �Robert Indiana: Beyond Love� at the Whitney unabashedly aims to extricate the artist from the public�s myopic reduction of his body of work to the iconic “LOVE” image of the 1970s. It succeeds in presenting Indiana as a brave, erudite, disciplined artist whose worldview is […]
Obsessive second-guessing, arguments with herself, and indecision all figure prominently in Heather Leigh McPherson’s painting process. A few weeks ago I stopped by her post-industrial-park Providence studio to check out her stunning new series of large-scale paintings. The brightly-colored, hovering mask-like images in her new work speak to the disconnect […]
I recently criticized Jerry Saltz for his group scold of contemporary painters, and today on the Vulture blog Saltz names a name, slamming Thomas Eggerer’s show at Petzel: The second I saw Thomas Eggerer’s current large show at Petzel Gallery � the artist’s fourth here since 2004�I thought, This overrated […]
